“I had never heard of miscarriage,” Meagan said. So when her and her husband Michael discovered they were pregnant after only eight months of marriage, their only response was excitement. They had always known they wanted to have a family, and were thrilled to find out theirs was growing so soon. But shortly after the good news, bad news arrived.
Meagan miscarried.
The shock of losing her first baby blindsided her. She fell into a depression and struggled to get pregnant again. Even though she didn’t know it then, her struggle with infertility would slowly become her identity and one that would turn their newlywed season upside down.
A year passed, and after struggling to get pregnant again, they sought out fertility treatments and the advice of doctors. They embarked on the long and frustrating journey of looking for answers. “It was unexplained, no one had an answer. That was the biggest struggle” she shared. “I love to understand things. So when someone couldn’t give me a reason, I realized I couldn’t be the one to make this happen.” The inability to change her circumstances became a daily swirl of anxiety. “‘Why?’ became an all-consuming question.”
Then Meagan suffered two more miscarriages.
Her quest for unanswered questions nearly colored in every interaction she had with God, with others, and of course, her husband. Michael agreed that dealing with infertility took a toll on their marriage. “All-consuming is the best way to describe it. Every hour you have to do something to improve your chances of having a child. You can’t step away from that one thing, even in your mind. There wasn’t even enough room to give God space.”
What was discovered from there only gave them probabilities and statistics to chart their experience against other people’s experience, but it wasn’t enough to deal with the weight of their very real, and personal infertility. “The statistics don’t really matter when you’re in it,” Michael shared, “We quickly began to realize that we are not a generalization of other people’s stories. This was our story.”
Meagan agreed. It didn’t matter how much information she consumed in trying to answer her questions, nothing changed. She was still faced with a marriage struggling under the burden of infertility and a faith that was being tossed about by each year that passed without a baby in their home. “What I learned looking back,’ Meagan admitted, “I was idolizing my own understanding of the situation. I was trying to grasp control. We knew that God worked out everything for the good of those who love Him, but it seemed at times that God forgot us. Everyone else around us was having babies.”
After they experienced a third miscarriage, a previous conversation between them came full circle. In Michael and Meagan’s dating years they had discussed adoption. “We were both very certain that we wanted to adopt. Our first conversation around the idea was incredibly unifying. We were on the same page.” But when the struggle of infertility took center stage in their life, adoption took a back seat to traditional family planning. But soon enough, the disappointment began to break them. They knew it wasn’t bringing life to their marriage or their relationship with Jesus.
“We took a year off before pursuing adoption to focus on community,” Michael said. That year was incredibly healing for both of them. “We chose to appreciate the things we did have, not the things we didn’t have.” When the time was right they connected with Christian Adoption Consultants and began the adoption process.
However, what they didn’t expect was for their marriage to implode as they began this new journey. “We found out that’s the case for some people who are walking through infertility. When we finally started this process, our marriage just fell apart.” The grieving of one season of their life snowballed into new expectations of the next. But Meagan and Michael didn’t give up. Instead, they relied on the community that God had brought around them a year before. They both agreed that “God was perfecting their faith.”
They came to a conclusion that if they were going to pursue adoption they had to seek God first. “There were still a lot of idols to let go of,” Meagan explained. “I always wanted a loving and supportive family, and I never had one. Relying on my own understanding meant I was basically relying on myself.”
So they began piecing their marriage back together, which was tattered and torn from years of trying to figure out an unfigurable problem. “It was as if God was telling both of us, ‘I’m your only rock. Focus on me,’” Meagan said. “Slowly and painfully he was taking away things that had taken His place one by one.”
In one of Michael’s specific prayer times, God gave him a picture of an iceberg. “In the picture I saw God drilling down into an iceberg past the surface and getting to the point where the ice broke. What was left behind was still water. It felt like God was saying, ‘In this moment, it’s painful but you need this breaking to be rebuilt.’” They agreed when attempting to do things themselves, they were drifting apart, but when God was in their disappointments, they were drawn together.
Once some deep work had been done in their hearts through community and prayer, the adoption process no longer presented a roadblock to health in their marriage; it provided that felt unity all those years ago. Meagan stepped out in faith and left behind a job to focus on building their family in this new way. “The timing felt perfect, because right after I quit an adoption came through.”
However, as they went further and further down the road things didn’t seem quite right. “We flew to Florida to meet the birth mom and solidify the adoption, but got a call shortly after that she couldn’t meet in person. She had all kinds of reasons, ‘Her father had died, and her son was shot.’”
Meagan and Michael’s entire community was lifting her up in prayer. But when their lawyer called the hospital for answers, they discovered she had already had the baby. “All along, she had led us to believe she was planning on following through with the adoption,” Meagan said heavily. It didn’t take long to discover that they had been the victims of adoption fraud. The entire process had been a scam.
Michael paused and shared a personal detail, “It was Christmas time when this happened. Every Christmas a loss came for us. Before the adoption fraud, all of our miscarriages happened around the holidays too. Every single Christmas something was taken.” Even so, they had an immense sense of peace and believed that God wasn’t finished. It was hard to imagine their marriage and well-being could survive that kind of disappointment, but deep down, both of them sensed that this adoption wasn’t the one for them. “Even though the timing was perfect, everything else felt wrong,” Meagan explained.
Instead of harboring bitterness and resentment towards the birth mother, they wrote to their family and friends who were supporting them and asked them to forgive her and keep the faith for their future child. They still were childless, but not without hope. “In that season, through God’s grace, we grew closer to Him than ever before. When we were seeking Him first, everything else faded into the distance.”
A month after the fraudulent adoption, a call came in notifying them that a new adoption was available. They decided to proceed. From the very first call with the birth mom, Meagan and Michael experienced a supernatural peace. “The birth mom looked right at us and said, ‘I know they are the ones,’” Meagan said with tears in her eyes. God knew who was going to be in their lives long before they did. This adoption experience was night and day compared to the one before. “After the baby was born, the birth mom’s Pacific Islander family gave us crowns and necklaces from their island and culture.” The spirit of celebration and blessing was overwhelming.
Meagan and Michael held their daughter, Malina (whose name means “peace”), in their arms just under a year from when they started the adoption process. And when they finally got to meet her, they were blown away by the beauty of that moment. The pain of past disappointment didn’t disappear, but it was now saturated in purpose. “We had seasons where we thought God forgot about us, but we realize He hadn’t. He was working everything for our good all along.”
However, what they weren’t expecting was to get a call from their adoption consultant three months after Malina was born about another baby boy named Fynn. The Mays’ were contacted because Fynn’s birth mom specifically wanted her son to go to a family that had experienced an adoption disruption like they had. At first, they responded by sharing the great news of their daughter’s adoption with the agency and figured that would be the end of that. But once it became clear that there were no legal issues with adopting two babies in such a short period of time, their hearts began to open yet again.
“We kept asking ourselves, ‘Are we crazy? Are we really open to this?’ And then we both decided, yeah, we are crazy. Sometimes that’s what walking in faith looks like.” Once again, the birth mom had many different families to choose from, but she said she knew the Mays’ were the ones in part because of the fact that they didn’t give up after such a devastating adoption experience prior.
So they said yes. They flew back to Florida to get Fynn and bring him home. During that trip they were able to meet Fynn’s birth mom and foster mom and experience how much support was already around him, “He’d already experienced so much love on his journey.”
When Michael and Megan left Florida this time, they brought both Malina and Fynn home. “We keep saying to each other, ‘I’ve never seen you so happy, Michael’ and ‘I’ve never seen you so happy, Meagan’. We are tired, but so full of joy.”
“Malina and Fynn are called ‘virtual twins’ since they are only three months apart.” Once again the outpouring of love and support flooded into their lives. The remainder of the secondary adoption fee was covered by Risen Hope, one of Reach’s church plants. Neighbors provided meals, house cleaning, postpartum care, and community support. They’ve been reminded again that God is always working things out.
Even so, the journey hasn’t been easy.
“Adoption isn’t all butterflies and rainbows,” Megan shared candidly. “You are choosing to walk into grief and trauma, and you bring those things into the adoption triad too. Grief from the birth family parting and grief from the family who’s been waiting and not able to conceive. There are a lot of emotions involved. You really have to have a heart for women in crisis pregnancy. It’s a lifelong journey about loving the family and not just the baby.” Michael added, “Things start moving when you stay focused on God. We have children now because we stopped controlling and let God be God.”
“Yes, we are now a multicultural family,” Meagan beamed. “We couldn’t imagine our family without our daughter and son. And we are so thankful for the journey that led us to both of them.”
Scroll through more photos of the Mays family below.
“I had never heard of miscarriage,” Meagan said. So when her and her husband Michael discovered they were pregnant after only eight months of marriage, their only response was excitement. They had always known they wanted to have a family, and were thrilled to find out theirs was growing so soon. But shortly after the good news, bad news arrived.
Meagan miscarried.
The shock of losing her first baby blindsided her. She fell into a depression and struggled to get pregnant again. Even though she didn’t know it then, her struggle with infertility would slowly become her identity and one that would turn their newlywed season upside down.
A year passed, and after struggling to get pregnant again, they sought out fertility treatments and the advice of doctors. They embarked on the long and frustrating journey of looking for answers. “It was unexplained, no one had an answer. That was the biggest struggle” she shared. “I love to understand things. So when someone couldn’t give me a reason, I realized I couldn’t be the one to make this happen.” The inability to change her circumstances became a daily swirl of anxiety. “‘Why?’ became an all-consuming question.”
Then Meagan suffered two more miscarriages.
Her quest for unanswered questions nearly colored in every interaction she had with God, with others, and of course, her husband. Michael agreed that dealing with infertility took a toll on their marriage. “All-consuming is the best way to describe it. Every hour you have to do something to improve your chances of having a child. You can’t step away from that one thing, even in your mind. There wasn’t even enough room to give God space.”
What was discovered from there only gave them probabilities and statistics to chart their experience against other people’s experience, but it wasn’t enough to deal with the weight of their very real, and personal infertility. “The statistics don’t really matter when you’re in it,” Michael shared, “We quickly began to realize that we are not a generalization of other people’s stories. This was our story.”
Meagan agreed. It didn’t matter how much information she consumed in trying to answer her questions, nothing changed. She was still faced with a marriage struggling under the burden of infertility and a faith that was being tossed about by each year that passed without a baby in their home. “What I learned looking back,’ Meagan admitted, “I was idolizing my own understanding of the situation. I was trying to grasp control. We knew that God worked out everything for the good of those who love Him, but it seemed at times that God forgot us. Everyone else around us was having babies.”
After they experienced a third miscarriage, a previous conversation between them came full circle. In Michael and Meagan’s dating years they had discussed adoption. “We were both very certain that we wanted to adopt. Our first conversation around the idea was incredibly unifying. We were on the same page.” But when the struggle of infertility took center stage in their life, adoption took a back seat to traditional family planning. But soon enough, the disappointment began to break them. They knew it wasn’t bringing life to their marriage or their relationship with Jesus.
“We took a year off before pursuing adoption to focus on community,” Michael said. That year was incredibly healing for both of them. “We chose to appreciate the things we did have, not the things we didn’t have.” When the time was right they connected with Christian Adoption Consultants and began the adoption process.
However, what they didn’t expect was for their marriage to implode as they began this new journey. “We found out that’s the case for some people who are walking through infertility. When we finally started this process, our marriage just fell apart.” The grieving of one season of their life snowballed into new expectations of the next. But Meagan and Michael didn’t give up. Instead, they relied on the community that God had brought around them a year before. They both agreed that “God was perfecting their faith.”
They came to a conclusion that if they were going to pursue adoption they had to seek God first. “There were still a lot of idols to let go of,” Meagan explained. “I always wanted a loving and supportive family, and I never had one. Relying on my own understanding meant I was basically relying on myself.”
So they began piecing their marriage back together, which was tattered and torn from years of trying to figure out an unfigurable problem. “It was as if God was telling both of us, ‘I’m your only rock. Focus on me,’” Meagan said. “Slowly and painfully he was taking away things that had taken His place one by one.”
In one of Michael’s specific prayer times, God gave him a picture of an iceberg. “In the picture I saw God drilling down into an iceberg past the surface and getting to the point where the ice broke. What was left behind was still water. It felt like God was saying, ‘In this moment, it’s painful but you need this breaking to be rebuilt.’” They agreed when attempting to do things themselves, they were drifting apart, but when God was in their disappointments, they were drawn together.
Once some deep work had been done in their hearts through community and prayer, the adoption process no longer presented a roadblock to health in their marriage; it provided that felt unity all those years ago. Meagan stepped out in faith and left behind a job to focus on building their family in this new way. “The timing felt perfect, because right after I quit an adoption came through.”
However, as they went further and further down the road things didn’t seem quite right. “We flew to Florida to meet the birth mom and solidify the adoption, but got a call shortly after that she couldn’t meet in person. She had all kinds of reasons, ‘Her father had died, and her son was shot.’”
Meagan and Michael’s entire community was lifting her up in prayer. But when their lawyer called the hospital for answers, they discovered she had already had the baby. “All along, she had led us to believe she was planning on following through with the adoption,” Meagan said heavily. It didn’t take long to discover that they had been the victims of adoption fraud. The entire process had been a scam.
Michael paused and shared a personal detail, “It was Christmas time when this happened. Every Christmas a loss came for us. Before the adoption fraud, all of our miscarriages happened around the holidays too. Every single Christmas something was taken.” Even so, they had an immense sense of peace and believed that God wasn’t finished. It was hard to imagine their marriage and well-being could survive that kind of disappointment, but deep down, both of them sensed that this adoption wasn’t the one for them. “Even though the timing was perfect, everything else felt wrong,” Meagan explained.
Instead of harboring bitterness and resentment towards the birth mother, they wrote to their family and friends who were supporting them and asked them to forgive her and keep the faith for their future child. They still were childless, but not without hope. “In that season, through God’s grace, we grew closer to Him than ever before. When we were seeking Him first, everything else faded into the distance.”
A month after the fraudulent adoption, a call came in notifying them that a new adoption was available. They decided to proceed. From the very first call with the birth mom, Meagan and Michael experienced a supernatural peace. “The birth mom looked right at us and said, ‘I know they are the ones,’” Meagan said with tears in her eyes. God knew who was going to be in their lives long before they did. This adoption experience was night and day compared to the one before. “After the baby was born, the birth mom’s Pacific Islander family gave us crowns and necklaces from their island and culture.” The spirit of celebration and blessing was overwhelming.
Meagan and Michael held their daughter, Malina (whose name means “peace”), in their arms just under a year from when they started the adoption process. And when they finally got to meet her, they were blown away by the beauty of that moment. The pain of past disappointment didn’t disappear, but it was now saturated in purpose. “We had seasons where we thought God forgot about us, but we realize He hadn’t. He was working everything for our good all along.”
However, what they weren’t expecting was to get a call from their adoption consultant three months after Malina was born about another baby boy named Fynn. The Mays’ were contacted because Fynn’s birth mom specifically wanted her son to go to a family that had experienced an adoption disruption like they had. At first, they responded by sharing the great news of their daughter’s adoption with the agency and figured that would be the end of that. But once it became clear that there were no legal issues with adopting two babies in such a short period of time, their hearts began to open yet again.
“We kept asking ourselves, ‘Are we crazy? Are we really open to this?’ And then we both decided, yeah, we are crazy. Sometimes that’s what walking in faith looks like.” Once again, the birth mom had many different families to choose from, but she said she knew the Mays’ were the ones in part because of the fact that they didn’t give up after such a devastating adoption experience prior.
So they said yes. They flew back to Florida to get Fynn and bring him home. During that trip they were able to meet Fynn’s birth mom and foster mom and experience how much support was already around him, “He’d already experienced so much love on his journey.”
When Michael and Megan left Florida this time, they brought both Malina and Fynn home. “We keep saying to each other, ‘I’ve never seen you so happy, Michael’ and ‘I’ve never seen you so happy, Meagan’. We are tired, but so full of joy.”
“Malina and Fynn are called ‘virtual twins’ since they are only three months apart.” Once again the outpouring of love and support flooded into their lives. The remainder of the secondary adoption fee was covered by Risen Hope, one of Reach’s church plants. Neighbors provided meals, house cleaning, postpartum care, and community support. They’ve been reminded again that God is always working things out.
Even so, the journey hasn’t been easy.
“Adoption isn’t all butterflies and rainbows,” Megan shared candidly. “You are choosing to walk into grief and trauma, and you bring those things into the adoption triad too. Grief from the birth family parting and grief from the family who’s been waiting and not able to conceive. There are a lot of emotions involved. You really have to have a heart for women in crisis pregnancy. It’s a lifelong journey about loving the family and not just the baby.” Michael added, “Things start moving when you stay focused on God. We have children now because we stopped controlling and let God be God.”
“Yes, we are now a multicultural family,” Meagan beamed. “We couldn’t imagine our family without our daughter and son. And we are so thankful for the journey that led us to both of them.”
